Could Andrew Scott make history? That question has been hanging over Telluride and Toronto ever since audiences got their first look at his towering performance in ELSINORE, Simon Stone’s new drama, which premiered at Telluride before crossing over to the Toronto International Film Festival. Scott plays Ian Charleson, a Scottish actor whose momentum has stalled in the years since CHARIOTS OF FIRE made him a name. The setting is 1989, and when Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly exits a production of HAMLET at London’s National Theatre, Charleson spots his chance to prove, once and for all, what he can do on a stage — even as AIDS is quietly destroying his body, and even as his doctor, played by Olivia Colman, warns him that pushing through the role could hasten his decline.

Critics have been quick to point out how neatly the casting folds in on itself. Scott has his own history playing Hamlet in London to great acclaim, which makes watching him inhabit a man whose Hamlet becomes a final act of defiance feel less like performance and more like reckoning. At its core, ELSINORE plays like a tribute to actors themselves — to acting as a calling rather than a job, and to the nerve it takes to keep stepping into the light while your body is failing you. Buried inside that tribute is a real piece of history waiting to happen: no openly gay man has ever won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and Scott’s work here has people wondering if he could be the one to finally break that streak.

The momentum around the film was on full display Saturday, September 13, when Scott walked onto the stage of the Royal Alexandra Theatre to a wave of applause for TIFF’s “In Conversation” series. Moderated by Keith Bennie, TIFF’s vice president of public programming, the conversation gave audiences a rare, extended look at both the making of ELSINORE and the arc of a career that has been building toward a moment like this one.